Trump ramps up heat on Harvard: Here are 5 reasons from the university's own investigation

The Trump administration escalated its war with Harvard University on Tuesday, announcing it will claw back the university's remaining $100 million in federal funding — effectively ending all financial ties with the Ivy League institution.

"The government is out of business with Harvard University, fully," a senior administration official told Fox News Digital.

At the center of the fight are accusations of Harvard failing to combat a campus culture of antisemitism. While the university accuses the White House of overreach and insists it is defending free speech, its own internal investigation appears to have handed Trump officials ammunition.

Earlier this year, Harvard President Alan Gerber called the 2023–2024 academic year "disappointing and painful" as he unveiled the results of two separate task forces: one examining antisemitism and the other focused on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias. 

The report from the antisemitism task force painted a bleak picture of life for Jewish and Israeli students on campus. 

Many said they felt ostracized, harassed online and unsupported by the university. Some students told investigators they had been pressured by peers, and even the faculty, to disavow ties to Israel to prove they were "one of the good ones." Others chose to hide their Jewish identity altogether.

Here is a look back at more findings of the report, released April 29.

1. Hostile environment for Jewish students

Jewish, Arab and Muslim students at Harvard reported feeling ostracized, pushed to the margins by their peers and experiencing online harassment. 

Jewish and Israeli students told the antisemitism task force the university’s response to complaints was "unclear and unconscionably slow."

Some Jewish students, according to the report, had been told by peers and even faculty members they were associated with "something offensive, and, in some cases, that their very presence was an offense."

Some decided to conceal their identities from classmates, while others were asked to renounce any ties to Israel to prove they were "one of the good ones."

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"No other group was constantly told that their history was a sham, that they or their co-religionists or co-ethnics were supremacists and oppressors, and that they had no right to the protections offered by anti-bias norms," read one section of the report. "Many Jewish students told us they feel like objects of suspicion."

One Jewish graduate student told the task force, "Jews are now being treated like Republicans were when I was in college." 

That statement "of course points to another problem with which elite universities have been struggling," the report said. 

At times, the anti-Muslim and antisemitism task force reports were seemingly at odds with each other. Muslim and pro-Palestinian students reported a widespread fear of doxxing, or having their personal identifying information shared publicly with the intent to intimidate or harm them. They reported often seeing pictures of their faces on the sides of trucks driven around campus by pro-Israel groups. 

Forty-seven percent of Muslim students reported feeling physically unsafe on campus during the 2023–2024 school year, compared with 15% of Jewish respondents. 

The antisemitism report called for a set of rules to govern permissible behaviors for instructors in classrooms, while the anti-Muslim and Arab bias task force called for the university to do more to protect academic freedom and free speech. 

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2. Academic biases

The antisemitism report found Harvard classes often portrayed "partisan and one-sided pedagogy" that failed to account for Jewish and Israeli perspectives, particularly within the university's divinity school and school of public health. 

The task force also documented instances when faculty canceled or ended class early on the day of a pro-Gaza protest or "gave time at the end of class for students to promote various solidarity groups" like the Palestine Solidarity Committee. 

The report recommended expanding courses on antisemitism, Judaism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to foster a more inclusive and comprehensive academic environment.

"Anti-Zionist views seem built into some classes," one student noted. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to Harvard for comment on the report. 

3. Political divides worsening 

In the 1980s and 1990s, the report found that at the university "pro-Israel organizers and pro-Palestinian organizers had disagreed strongly yet often worked together to build bridges and to imagine jointly a better future for the region."

"Those efforts started to fade in the 2000s amidst the Second Intifada and through the Israel-Hamas wars of the 2010s, and by the time Hamas crashed through the Israeli border fence in 2023 the conditions at Harvard (as in the Middle East itself) were very different," the report read. 

Some pro-Palestinian campus organizers viewed bridge-building activities "as a form of betrayal," the report found. 

The report found that many students, including Jewish ones, had "sympathy" for Israel’s "massive military response" that followed the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

However, campus protests "crossed a line from a call for freedom and security for Palestinians and Jews alike to a stereotyped notion: that Israel is not a state, but rather a ‘settler colony’ of white Europeans who have no real connection with the land they had stolen, that epitomized aggression, and was bereft of virtues."

4. Admissions process led to dwindling Jewish population

The report found that changes in Harvard’s admissions policies meant that by 2023, the Jewish student community was much smaller than it was in the early 2010s. 

The hostility that some students had felt, the report found, was "degrading" to the university, and some Jewish students turned down offers of admission to Harvard over it. 

Some Jewish students vying for doctorate degrees said they decided to leave for private industry jobs because of the perception that academia is "unfriendly to Jews." 

Some non-Jewish faculty members told the task force that Jewish candidates had turned down post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Jewish medical school students shied away from residencies at Harvard hospitals "because of the deep politicization of the climate." 

The task force determined Harvard should change its admissions policy to reflect "what campus should look like: people listening to each other." 

5. Lack of educational oversight 

The task force also found a lack of oversight over seemingly university-endorsed educational content. 

The Harvard Chan School of Public Health, for example, launched a Palestinian program in 2022 that is run by a "leadership collective" of five individuals, none of whom hold a tenure-track faculty appointment at Harvard. 

"The use of the Harvard brand for a research or teaching project creates expectations among Harvard faculty, staff, students, and the broader public. Programs operating without the guidance and oversight of Harvard’s regular faculty with expertise risk falling short of these expectations," the task force found. 

In another example, the task force found the coursework for a master's degree in Religion and Public Life to be misrepresented. The program is advertised as offering students a better understanding of religion to illuminate a range of contemporary issues. 

Both faculty and students did not expect the program to be as focused on the Israel–Palestinian issue as it was, and some students found "program offerings and materials disproportionately presented Israelis and Jews as guilty of monstrous historical crimes, which require both repentance and redress."

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The program "appears to have focused on non-mainstream Jewish religious perspectives that lack widespread support within the Jewish diaspora or in Israel." It also linked Jews to "two great sins," according to the task force: the creation of the state of Israel and participation in White supremacy, which staff "appeared to embrace openly."